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As always with these stories you have to read between the lines to work out what kind of culture-war zealots Google is having to contend with.

throw_m239339 7y ago
Anybody who interact with the US IT scene, especially the silicon valley knows what's up. From GitHub to NPM to Google it's political shitshow after political shitshow. It's rogue employees brainwashed by a cunning, sophistic and insidious ideology, transforming the workplace into a political battleground with the goal of making it impossible for people without "the right politics" to work there, under guise of "unionizing". First it was tech conferences, then open source communities, now it's IT businesses themselves that need to be in the service of that ideology. These people are trying to turn IT into the same ideological shithole they turned academia into...
- gddvhy 7y ago
  Right. And I don't get what their plan is. In academia they may leverage external support, e.g. someone outside makes generous donations to a university on monthly basis and then hints that if that wrong white male isn't fired or expelled, the donations might stop. Google can't be manipulated this way and obviously, these activists will be lucky to get any support outside their circles.
  - thu2111 7y ago
    Just keep up the moral and psychological pressure, that's all it takes. Look at the constant leftward drift in academia. Not all of that is rich donors mysteriously interested in political agendas that involve increasing their own tax rate; most of it isn't. The sort of people who would politically oppose them are conservatives, who by their very nature tend to be ... conservative. That is, careful about challenging the status quo and uninterested in activism. So frequently they just stay quiet and don't talk much about their views: that's why the walkouts and Googler activists on Twitter always seem to have the same agenda. It looks like Googlers all agree but they don't, not at all. But this has an insidious impact in two forms: 1. People whose own convictions aren't that strong can be easily swayed by constant arguments of the form, "if you disagree with me you're evil and bad" because everyone wants to be good and they're not being supplied with intellectual ammo with which to fight back. 2. People who are trying to calculate the cost of resistance look around and don't see any allies, just a big angry mob, so feel they have to fold even if they disagree. The correct way to handle this sort of situation is for senior managers to have strong and relatively small-c conservative convictions, such that progressive placard-waving activism is swiftly dealt with via firings with everyone being made clear on why those people got fired (political arguments do not belong in the workplace). Google doesn't have that and we can see the result.

throw_m239339 7y ago

Anybody who interact with the US IT scene, especially the silicon valley knows what's up. From GitHub to NPM to Google it's political shitshow after political shitshow. It's rogue employees brainwashed by a cunning, sophistic and insidious ideology, transforming the workplace into a political battleground with the goal of making it impossible for people without "the right politics" to work there, under guise of "unionizing". First it was tech conferences, then open source communities, now it's IT businesses themselves that need to be in the service of that ideology. These people are trying to turn IT into the same ideological shithole they turned academia into...

gddvhy 7y ago
Right. And I don't get what their plan is. In academia they may leverage external support, e.g. someone outside makes generous donations to a university on monthly basis and then hints that if that wrong white male isn't fired or expelled, the donations might stop. Google can't be manipulated this way and obviously, these activists will be lucky to get any support outside their circles.
- thu2111 7y ago
  Just keep up the moral and psychological pressure, that's all it takes. Look at the constant leftward drift in academia. Not all of that is rich donors mysteriously interested in political agendas that involve increasing their own tax rate; most of it isn't. The sort of people who would politically oppose them are conservatives, who by their very nature tend to be ... conservative. That is, careful about challenging the status quo and uninterested in activism. So frequently they just stay quiet and don't talk much about their views: that's why the walkouts and Googler activists on Twitter always seem to have the same agenda. It looks like Googlers all agree but they don't, not at all. But this has an insidious impact in two forms: 1. People whose own convictions aren't that strong can be easily swayed by constant arguments of the form, "if you disagree with me you're evil and bad" because everyone wants to be good and they're not being supplied with intellectual ammo with which to fight back. 2. People who are trying to calculate the cost of resistance look around and don't see any allies, just a big angry mob, so feel they have to fold even if they disagree. The correct way to handle this sort of situation is for senior managers to have strong and relatively small-c conservative convictions, such that progressive placard-waving activism is swiftly dealt with via firings with everyone being made clear on why those people got fired (political arguments do not belong in the workplace). Google doesn't have that and we can see the result.